St. Luke’s Achieves Compelling Results After Implementing Masimo Supplemental Remote Monitoring Solution

St. Luke’s University Health Network (St. Luke’s) and Masimo announced that St. Luke’s, a regional network of 10 hospitals and 320 affiliated sites providing service to 10 counties in eastern Pennsylvania, is expanding their use of a variety of Masimo technologies following impressive outcome results at a pilot site.

Four years ago, seeking to improve patient safety and reduce morbidity and mortality in their hospitals, St. Luke’s formed a multidisciplinary taskforce – comprised of anesthesiologists, nurses, respiratory specialists, hospital leaders, and others – charged with implementing changes and tracking outcomes in a pilot location, a 34-bed orthopedic trauma ward at their hospital in Bethlehem. As part of that program, which also involved changes in clinical practice and alarm management, St. Luke’s installed Masimo Patient SafetyNet™, a supplemental remote monitoring and clinician notification system, in the pilot ward. Patients were monitored at the bedside using the Masimo Root^® patient monitoring and connectivity hub in conjunction with Masimo Radius-7^®tetherless, wearable Pulse CO-Oximeters^® that continuously monitor patients’ oxygen saturation and pulse rate using Masimo SET^® Measure-through Motion and Low Perfusion™ pulse oximetry. Through Patient SafetyNet, these and other parameters can be continuously remotely monitored from central view stations and even smartphones, with the ability to alert clinicians from afar to possible deterioration in patient condition. In 2016, a year after implementation of the program, clinicians achieved impressive outcome and financial results compared to 2015 performance, including a 62% reduction in mortality, a 36% reduction in naloxone administration, a 23% reduction in the utilization of telemetry, a 26% reduction in critical care transfers, and an estimated savings of $900,000 in cost avoidance.

“Because of the unpredictability of which patients will deteriorate, continuous and in-depth monitoring provides a valuable level of data that can be acted upon quickly to save lives,” said Aldo Carmona, MD, Chairman of the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care and SVP of Clinical Integration, who leads the initiative. “Constant monitoring of changes in patient conditions will alert doctors and nurses when gradual deterioration is sensed, enabling a quicker therapeutic response and avoiding emergent situations.”

Following the successful pilot program, St. Luke’s expanded use of Patient SafetyNet to an additional 48 beds across two additional units on their Bethlehem campus. Now, three years later, the network is again expanding use of Patient SafetyNet and other Masimo solutions to almost 500 beds in total, so that all eight existing hospitals will have the technology – and in two hospitals slated to open this year, only Masimo continuous monitoring technologies will be used outside the ICU. Monitoring data is now automatically transferred from bedside devices and Patient SafetyNet to St. Luke’s Epic electronic medical record (EMR) system, helping improve productivity and reducing the likelihood of transcription errors.¹ Vital Signs Check, an application for Root designed to streamline vital signs measurement workflows and optimize patient data management, is also being implemented. “With the higher acuity levels of many hospitalized patients, taking vital signs over four or eight hours is no longer effective in many cases, and developing conditions are missed until they become critical threats sometimes resulting in poor outcomes,” Dr. Carmona said.

Speaking of the ongoing expansion and enhancement of their continuous monitoring program, Dr. Carmona commented, “This Patient SafetyNet initiative will be the most important patient safety project I will work on in my whole career.”

St. Luke’s sought inspiration from another institution’s successful implementation of continuous monitoring using Masimo SET^® and Patient SafetyNet: Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, where researchers found that continuous monitoring of adult post-surgical patients using Masimo SET^® pulse oximetry on Masimo bedside devices, in conjunction with Masimo Patient SafetyNet, resulted in a 65% reduction in rapid response team activations and a 48% reduction in transfers back to the ICU.² Over five years, Dartmouth-Hitchcock achieved their goal of zero preventable deaths or brain damage due to opioids,³ and over ten years, they maintained a 50% reduction in unplanned transfers and a 60% reduction in rescue events, despite increases in patient acuity and occupancy.⁴ With the monitoring of additional physiological parameters and integration into EMRs, St. Luke’s initiative is set to provide even more continuous supplemental monitoring coverage than at Dartmouth-Hitchcock.

Joe Kiani, Founder and CEO of Masimo, said, “We are honored to partner with St. Luke’s as they continue to expand their patient safety and monitoring initiatives. Our mission – to improve patient outcomes and reduce the cost of care – aligns well with their values. Their ongoing commitment to saving lives through our proven SET^® and Patient SafetyNet technology is a model we hope more and more institutions will see the benefits of implementing.”